That's what Loren Feldman of 1938 Media has to say about AOL's acquisition of Techcrunch. He says is signals the moment when anything of merit on the blogosphere will be bought up by the big companies like Yahoo, AOL, and Google, and the small fry won't be able to survive.
He congratulates Michael Arrington, owner of TechCrunch, but only to blast him personally and say the buyout is about Arrington having reached the end of his emotional rope.
"The posts were getting more and more ridiculous and weird," says Feldman -- and I think he means posts like the controversial "women in tech" posts and other stuff that seemed to go off the rails -- and then with angelgate:
"...He actually thought he was a reporter. And just a really negative, dark vibe about the whole thing" -- meaning it was time to "hang it up".
Loren's is probably among the most truthful and knowledgeable about this event so watch his tape.
Pretty stark stuff, and Loren is smart and he should know -- he knows "Mikey" very well, and "Jay" -- Jason Calacanis -- and he says Mikey screwed Jason over on the past deal regarding the TechCrunch 50 conference, which apparently was Steve Gilmor's idea, and he brought Calacanis and Arrington together (so I guess the point is that given how much revenue TechCrunch 50 produced for the business, Calacanis should have been able to get a bigger piece out of an eventual buy-out like this.)
This clash of the titans shouldn't matter to us little guys, but I have an uneasy feeling it does.
I don't have the geek's aversion to AOL at all. I simply don't have a problem with it. I personally found the AOL set-up and vise-like subscription-grab a nuisance, but lots of people I know still have their AOL accounts. Whenever some tech snarks that AOL was a walled garden and that's why it "lost" the Web 1.0, I shrug and ask them how many millions of teenagers on the planet are chatting on AIM right now, AOL's property, and how many are on, oh, I dunno, Thunderbird? AOL's a walled garden; so is TechCrunch a walled garden of insular tekkies talking shop.
The angelgate story, where Mike walks into a bar and finds angel investors who fund start-ups all seated at a table together, where he speculates that they may have been colluding on price-fixing, now appears in an entirely different light. He was already discussing the AOL deal and essentially had closed it by then, so he may have felt brazen, with AOL at his back, exposing those men.
But it also seems...eerie. Once you're in a giant corporation like AOL, does it *matter* any more, who is funding what little start-up and maybe buddying up to plan so nobody has to pay too much for this trinket, that they will sell back to each other another day?
The film of Arrington is also queasy-making. Maybe he always looks like he's been punched or had a bad night with drugs, but he has bags under his eyes and looks sucker-punched.
The curious enacting of the signover seems joyless. The AOL guy seems uncomfortable and not that happy. I don't get what's in it for AOL. I guess it gives them traffic to buy ads that they sell?
And that's where we come in. There will presumably be more of us if the ads are things like Moms going back to school, with the dogs hanging out of the window of the family station wagon, instead of...Seagate or some geeky thing.
I guess they really made the money on the conferences, especially ones about start-ups and disruption and such where the speakers -- if it is anything like the rest of the industry's practices -- pay to be on a panel. That I can understand. It's like the way non-profits make their real money on the annual awards dinners.
I asked Arrington in the comments about his reflections on angelgate if he could tell us whether the angels that he now felt compelled to make nice to after this awkward meeting and his blogation about it in fact had paid to be on his panel. (That *is* usually the practice, it's a kind of industry advertising.)
But Loren's pronunciations about this are indeed grim. He says it's the end of blogging, the end of indies. Not of him, because he'll stay an indy, but he brutally pointed out that the big companies, like CNET, CNN, etc. -- they will rule the Google search, and get all the customers, and it will be very very hard to be seen.
There's a lot we don't know about all this and aren't being told. It's very odd that Arrington, coming from a company called *TECH*crunch, says he had "technical difficulties" with the engineers. That he faced constant problems with getting good engineers to...keep his blog software in order and his Crunchbase -- data base of tech companies -- in order. Huh? A blog platform and a dbase, and you couldn't run that? It's odd. After all, this isn't some interactive dynamic changing thing like Twitter with 12 million users or whatever, it's just a blog with 50,000 visitors a day or something, right?
It's not that I think AOL will encroach on Arrington's or MC Siegal's or Paul Carr's editorial independence. But they may gradually make it known that they don't like the snottyness of some of these people and their constant whining about nothing. They may decide they have to lose the really punchy reader comments -- Arrington on his own might feel in his setting of geeks that he dare not tamper with it, but when it is AOL's company, they can handily get rid of the trolls -- who of course, might be the people really criticizing AOL or Arrington legitimately, but they will call them trolls, as Arrington often does with anyone who crosses him.
Loren even said that Arrington was getting tired and wanted out of it because he was fed up with the draining negative comments and the trolls. Huh? The ones that are rabid and unhinged. But the legitimate ones have a point, and you learn from it. Why are geeks in the public eye like this so thin-skinned?
I really have to wonder how this is going to work. A taste of how weird it is comes with today's M.C. Siegler story on another acquisition:
Well, this is kind of awkward.
A couple weeks ago, we reported that AOL was in the process of acquiring of Thing Labs
, makers of Brizzly. Neither AOL or Thing Labs would comment at the time, but we had multiple good sources on the deal. Fast forward to today: AOL is finally confirming the deal — right after they just acquired us.
So yes, like we said, AOL is acquiring Thing Labs. Only now, it’s technically our parent company that is buying them. So congrats to us, I guess?!
Erk, that kind of stuff is going to get old fast -- and when AOL tells them they can't comment, will they shut up, or publish a story about how AOL won't comment and then speculate -- like they do now?
I do have to admit that I think this will lead to TechCrunch losing its garage-band feel, and that's sad.
When Tim Armstrong of AOL says this kind of stuff, does he mean just injecting advertising into tech blog copy?
What will take its place?
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